Friday, October 16, 2015

Latest
Japanese achievements for global environment were released. The grand champion
is, of course, Toyota’s fuel cell vehicle “Mirai (the future),” and it is
followed by various epoch-making technologies to preserve global environment. Mirai
has already received a total of more than 3,000 units by the end of August this
year for the domestic market alone. It is priced at about 7 million yen now,
though it cost 100 million yen to build a prototype model in 2008. Toyota is scheduled
to increase the annual production capacity from 700 units at present to 3,000
units in 2017.

Research Institute for Humanity and Nature developed a technology to increase crop yields
by preventing the soil from being eroded. The new technology creates fallow
soil about 5 meters wide in the farmland where no seeds are planted and no
weeds are eradicated. Because soil and organic substances are blown to the
fallow soil, crop yields of the entirely farmland increases by changing the place
of the fallow soil every year. The experiment conducted in Niger of Africa, the
new technology decreased wind erosion by about 70% and increased crop yields by
30-80%. It does not need much investment, and it greatly contributes to
increasing food production in regions suffering from poverty.

Taisei
Corporation developed a technology to purify water polluted water of industrial
water disposal facilities and industrial effluent treatment facilities with the
help of bacteria found in the soil in alliance with Osaka University and Kitasato University. The new technology efficiently dissolves 1,4-Dioxane that is hard
to eliminate and supposed to pose a health risk. It can decrease the
maintenance cost by 80% and input energy by 60% than the method that uses an
oxidant. The experiment to prove the performance of this technology proved that
it can maintain the ability to keep the concentration of polluted groundwater at
lower than the environmental standard for three months.

Railway Technical Research Institute developed a superconductive cable that can reduce
energy consumption by 5%. It succeeded in the test run this year using an existing
railway line.